Folks on the Silent Hill team at Konami wouldn't tell me how the Vita's Silent Hill: Book of Memories will pull this off. They simply offered some intriguing comments:

"We've been thinking about multiplayer for a while," Tomm Hulett, who is also working on the upcoming console game Silent Hill Downpour, told me. "We had to have the right idea. We wanted to do something that felt like satisfying multiplayer and felt like it was in the Silent Hill universe."

I was mystified about what that could mean, about how those two things can fit well together. Enter producer Devin Shatsky, who started describing the game as "a different Silent Hill experience. He said it's <not a third-person action game." And, gesturing to Downpour, which is a classic, creepy, skulk-through-the-darkness kind of Silent Hill that mixes exploration and combat, he said, "It's not this with multiplayer."

So what is it? These guys seemed extremely confident. But they spilled nothing.